Wednesday, March 21, 2012

When I recently wrote a report in LaTex I struggled to get the letter @ into that report.
My thought was, that @ has to be some kind of special symbol in LaTex, because everything that's not a letter or number is a special symbol for starting e.g. some formatting (what is actually wrong, but you'll find out later).
So, my first try was to escape the @ with a backslash. And, after saving, my TeXlipse showed me an error (Missing $ inserted. \@).
Ok, no problem, I have to escape the backslash for escaping the @ with another backslash. Actually, that worked so far.
So, I went on writing. After a while I took a look into the PDF and saw, that the titles with the @ (the title started with it) had a line feed and was not, where it was supposed to be. Now Google had to solve my problem. Unfortunately Google couldn't solve my problem. The only halfway helpful result was a blog in which the author suggested to write the @ in math-mode, like $@$.
That worked for the title and the @ in the text. But, because of the math-mode, the @ wasn't as pretty as it should be.
That was the point when I got a little bit upset about LaTex. In general I like it, but that was really bugging me. Also, because it seemed to be such a small problem.

After even more wild combinations in Google and some time, I found the solution.
.
.
.
Simply write the @ and everything is fine. No escaping, no special command (like \texttrademark) and no import of some symbol packages.
Sometimes the solution is sooooo simple ;)

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Former business informatics student, former software engineer and currently student again to receive my master's degree in computer science.Interested in many things related to software development, distributed systems and software architecture.